A group blog to promote discussion, debate and insight into the history, particularly religious, of America's founding. Any observations, questions, or comments relating to the blog's theme are welcomed.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Here's an interesting book review that I thought I would share. It's written by a colleague of mine, one of my former law professors. The review was originally published in the American Journal of Legal History, and is reprinted here with the permission of the author. Enjoy!

In The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison have set about to correct a truncated representation of what the Founders thought was the proper relationship between religion and public life--particularly the place of religion in politics. There is plenty of scholarship already available to challenge the claim that Jefferson's metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state was reflective of some sort of consensus among the Founders, and this volume offers additional reflection on the topic.

Before delving into the contribution that this volume offers, it would be helpful to answer the question, “Who cares?” Or perhaps more specifically, what purchase on contemporary issues is expected to be gained from an appeal to what the Founders believed? The short answer is that a common trope in contemporary politics is to accuse the “Religious Right” of betraying the vision of the Founders by failing to observe a distinction between the private dictates of religion and the public obligations of government. As pious as some of our Founders may have been, so goes the claim, they created a form of government that relegated religion to the realm of the personal and private, relying upon more universal principles to animate the structure of government. In fact, some claim that the Founding Fathers adopted a radically different conception from that of the “Planting Fathers,” rejecting their religious vision in favor of a form of government that prohibited any alliance between church and state.

To be sure, there is an equal and opposite claim on behalf of the so-called Religious Right: not only is the wall of separation metaphor misleading, but by attempting to exclude religion from the public square, “separationists” are ignoring the wisdom of the Founders. As even William 0. Douglas, an icon of the modern civil liberties movement, recognized in Zorach v. Clausen, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Critics of the separationist position argue that, leaving aside the prospect of divine retribution, failure to recognize the wisdom of the Founders will erode the foundation upon which the success of the American experiment has been built.

Thus, the reason that we are properly interested in the views of the Founders is to help resolve the dispute over who is more entitled to speak for the Founders on the question of how the spheres of religious belief and government are related. And in using the phrase “Forgotten Founders” in the title, the authors are suggesting that the subjects of the individual essays in the book have been relegated to undeserved obscurity in the usual presentation of the Founders. To be sure, most of the names are well known: Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Abigail Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Thomas Paine. These are names that most educated people could recognize as playing significant roles in the Revolution and its aftermath. The other names would be harder to pick out: Oliver Ellsworth, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and Mercy Otis Warren. These individuals are known to scholars of the era, and in some cases had a more decisive influence on the public understanding of religion's role in public life than those with greater name recognition.

Each essay is interesting in its own right, because in the life history of each subject there is a mixture of extraordinary opportunity combined with daunting personal hardship and challenge. For example, Alexander Hamilton's brilliance and public success combined with personal limitation and moral failure. Three years before his death he returned to the piety of his youth. As with many (perhaps most) people, the encounter of unexpected misfortune, or acknowledgement of serious personal failing, leads to a conversion of the heart. Even if the individual (in most cases) is already a Christian believer of a traditional variety, there is a renewed appreciation of how profoundly dependent each individual is upon the continued mercy of God.

It would be one thing if the essays merely documented the personal piety of the Founders. That would be consistent with the vision of the separationists-- religion as an uplifting and useful activity, but optional and private. Instead, each of the essay subjects assumed that a proper relationship to one's Creator was necessary not just for individuals, but for nations as well. In the same way that an individual, forgetful of his status as a creature, and inclined to assume that he is entitled to make his own rules, will soon discover how painfully inadequate he is to live without divine assistance, the nation that loses its sense of dependence upon a Divine Governor is likely to fall victim to the various ills that have plagued governments throughout history. Worse yet, unlike individuals, who may be rescued from a wayward path by concerned friends or acquaintances, nations tend to acknowledge their wrongdoing only after calamity has struck. Whereas King David took advantage of the Prophet Nathan's rebuke to mend his ways, the nation of Israel ignored the Prophet Jeremiah and wound up in the Babylonian Captivity.

In this context the controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind. Whereas no one has made a claim that it is unconstitutional to invite schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the United States, there is a well-known challenge to saying the Pledge with the words “under God” inserted after the words “one nation.” With the essays of this book in hand, one can appreciate why it might be seen as a mistake to pledge allegiance to a country before there was some assurance that the country was properly restrained by an acknowledgement of higher duties.

The Founders could certainly have been wrong in their understanding; but this volume is an important contribution to an accurate representation of what they actually believed, and it may help strengthen the judgment that they were correct.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Northwestern University law professor Stephen Presser has said that "at first blush, it would appear that none but the truly weird would find these two new volumes ... compulsive late-night page-turners." But I joined him in the company of the weird by marking all the references that could be construed as religious. I began at the outer limits with what I call the "sacral penumbra" of nondescript and rather noncommittal incidental references. (These do not include the more frequent and clear references in the sustained arguments discussed later in this essay.) My marker found three favorites: at least 30 "Heavens," as in "merciful Heaven," and 15 or 20 "blessings of heaven"; there were 15 usually casual "sacreds," as in "sacred liberties." God comes up often, but almost never in biblical terms; "God," we remember, was generic for deists and theists, philosophers and believers alike. In one instance in this collection, one John Smilie quotes the Declaration of Independence on the Creator. Beyond that, in these two lengthy volumes there are about 20 references to God, while the Almighty and the Creator make single cameo appearances. We read at least seven times of Providence; the Supremes are here four times, as in Supreme Being and Supreme Ruler of the Universe; Lord, as in "O Lord!" or "the Year of Our Lord," turns up six times, and there is a Sovereign Ruler of Events, one Grace, two Governors (of the World and the Universe),two Nature's Gods, and, for good measure, one Goddess of Liberty. Whether the general absence of the biblical God is intentional or reflects the habits of the Enlightenment, it is significant.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

American historian extraordinaire Forrest McDonald and his wife Ellen Shapo McDonald have a very solid answer to that question: John Dickinson. Read their whole answer over at The Imaginative Conservative. I don't think there is much question that Dickinson is massively overlooked by most modern historians. Along with Samuel Adams, John Jay and Patrick Henry, Dickinson is out of fashion with the modern age. Part of this has to do with the fact that none of those men every ascended to the presidency. But part of it has to do with the intellectual fads and obsessions of our time. Thus, they are not the subject of serious study for the most part. Yet our Revolution and our constitutional order would have been impossible without those men. The fact that they are overlooked says far more about us than it does about them.

Here. Kerry Walters of Gettysburg College is one of the leading promoters of the Deist Founding thesis. Ed Brayton takes him to task, arguing for a more accurate and nuanced view.

One thing I liked about Walters' article is the discussion of Bishop James Madison (President Madison's first cousin). I'm not sure whether BJM was orthodox. However he did promote Enlightenment theories, like the perfectibility of man, seemingly at odds with traditional Christianity and intermixed them with his "Christian" theology.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

I could see Chris Rodda titling her post: "David Barton Lies About Warren Throckmorton." Barton claims two professors from Messiah (it's actually Grove City; he must have confused Throckmorton and Coulter with John Fea) didn't use primary sources when they refuted his book, rather they only quoted from other professors.
Dr. Throckmorton explains that, to the contrary, they did indeed cite primary sources.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Co-blogger Tom Van Dyke is arguing the controversy at Warren Throckmorton's blog here. This is a long comment I left:

Dave,

You might want to check out American Creation where we feature news about Dr. Gregg Frazer's new book (and other things as well, including news on Drs. Throckmorton and Fea).

The "key Founders" -- the first 4 Presidents, Ben Franklin, James Wilson, G. Morris and A. Hamilton -- were not "strict Deists" in the absentee Landlord sense. Yet, they weren't "Christians" in the orthodox sense either. They were, as Dr. Frazer categorizes them, "theistic rationalists" which is somewhere in between. The theistic rationalists were theological unitarians. So others might term them "unitarians." There are smoking guns that prove this the case with Jefferson, J. Adams and Franklin. The others rely more on circumstantial evidence. They were all theists (that is believed in an active personal God). Hamilton was not provably an orthodox Christian until the end of his life (after his son died in a duel). The other FFs were not provably orthodox Christians during any time in their adult life when they did the work "Founding" the nation. I'm not aware of other key Founder than Hamilton having an end of life conversion to orthodox Christianity. George Washington, for instance, died a Stoic death where he asked for no ministers and said no prayers. But you never know what's going on in someone's head and heart before they take their last breath.

David Holmes prefers to term the key Founders "Christian-Deists," as opposed to the non-Christian deism of Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer. But those three were the only notable "strict Deists" among the Founders. (It's debatable whether Palmer was a notable Founder).

There were a lot of orthodox Christians among the 2nd and lower tier Founders. They include John Witherspoon, John Jay, Roger Sherman, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry.

With regards to the rest, well, we just don't know. Proving they had some kind of formal affiliation with an orthodox Church -- which THEY ALL DID -- really proves nothing other than they had some kind of formal affiliation with an orthodox Church.

It would be error to assume, as some do, the rest were "all" something. Elias Boudinot and Fisher Ames were probably orthodox Christians. Benjamin Rush was an orthodox Christian Universalist who believed in the doctrine of universal salvation, believing all would be saved through Christ's universal, as opposed to limited Atonement. Timothy Pickering was a unitarian, and William Livingston may have been. John Marshall was a unitarian who converted to orthodoxy shortly before he died. Joel Barlow was either a strict deist or perhaps an atheist.

Here. You should read the whole thing. But I like where Dr. Frazer discusses David Holmes' thesis:

As the title of my book suggests, my project was to determine the religious beliefs
of the key founders, so I was not very concerned with public
activities---except in cases in which an activity would have been
unpopular or controversial or somehow gives insight into actual belief.
Consequently, my only interest in church attendance is to show some
interest in Christianity and to trace the frequency of church attendance
when the public is watching compared to when it is not.

As for the sacraments, I find Washington's steadfast refusal to take
communion and Hamilton's intense desire to do so after his conversion to
Christ (but not before) to be very informative.

The significance of religious activity and inactivity entirely depends
on the nature of the activity and what it reveals about sincerely held
belief and not on mere frequency or public recognition.

I consider their use of religious language to be absolutely crucial.
There is no other way to get at what they really believed. What language
did they use in public versus private? What terms for God did they
use? Did they use specifically Christian language or generic
"religious" language?

A matter of language that is critically important is to determine what they
meant by certain terms. Too often, for example, Christian America
advocates simply cite quotes in which founders refer to "Christianity"
or "Christian" and leave the false impression with Christian
readers/listeners that those words meant the same thing to the founders
as they do to them. But key founders such as John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, and Ben Franklin meant something very different by those
words. They created their own versions of "Christianity" that bore very
little resemblance to its actual or common meaning. Other words such
as "bigot" had very different meanings in the 18th century than they do
today and proper understanding requires recognition and explanation of
that fact.

A centerpiece of my argument is my conviction that the terms "Christian"
and "deist" have been so broadly applied to the founders that they've
become virtually meaningless categories. This is largely due to the
fact that those two categories have been the only generally accepted
niches, so individuals have been shoehorned into one of those
identifications whether they fit or not. I carefully define both terms
to provide boundaries that would have been recognized in 18th-century
America in order to produce more accuracy---more truth in labeling.

Holmes's conclusions seem to me to illustrate my point perfectly. While
we do not deal with exactly the same people, Holmes covers five of the
eight persons I class as "key founders." In common with virtually
everyone (except me), he calls Jefferson and Franklin deists. Along
with many scholars, but not necessarily a majority, he also calls
Madison a deist. But his determinations regarding George Washington and
John Adams highlight the "shoehorn" activity mentioned above and
particularly point to the need for my work. He calls Washington a
"Deistic Episcopalian" and Adams a "Christian Deist." In 18th-century
terms, these descriptions are nonsensical---and they do not stand up to
the evidence.

that doesn't "get" the religious pluralism of the American Founding. It's here. The article features a pastor who holds to a very strict understanding of the Christian faith, trying to claim the "Christian" heritage of the American Founding while juxtaposing the terms "Christian" and "Judeo-Christian."

The context of controversy is some local town opens its meetings in Jesus name and America's United For Separation of Church and State files a complaint telling them to consider more generic prayers or not having prayers at all.

My main beef with the Pastor's thoughts is the idea that America has an exclusively "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" "foundation."
No. America has a synthesis foundation. It's not exclusive. It's pluralistic. It's Protestant Christian, Hebraic, Enlightenment, Whig, Common Law, Natural Law/Natural Rights, noble pagan (Greco-Roman, and even Anglo-Saxon).

And, to repeat, it's pluralistic.

If it is "Judeo-Christian," and there are Jews at the town meeting, well, they probably don't want to hear prayers in Jesus' name. While I can't speak for how the Founding era chaplains opened their meetings -- I agree with the Pastor, that, I'm sure a lot of it was done in Jesus name -- I do know that the first four Presidents never prayed in Jesus name while acting as President. George Washington, for instance, a great man of prayer, was never recorded as praying in Jesus name ever.

(The closest you get to a prayer in Jesus name among Founding Presidents was the unitarian John Adams' Thanksgiving Address which mentioned the Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Which, by the way, John Adams later regretted giving.)

Something tells me the pastor doesn't want to appreciate the American Founding's inclusive and religiously pluralistic heritage because it looks too close to "the universalism message that ‘all religious views hold equal value and consideration[,]’” which he derides.
Well that heritage is just as "there" in America's Founding along with the "Christian" and "Judeo-Christian" heritage.

By DAVID V. MASON at the New York Times here. And here is Philip Jenkin's takedown.
From the NYT piece:

For the curious, the dispute can be reduced to Jesus. Mormons assert that because they believe Jesus is divine, they are Christians by default. Christians respond that because Mormons don’t believe — in accordance with the Nicene Creed promulgated in the fourth century — that Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Jesus that Mormons have in mind is someone else altogether. The Mormon reaction is incredulity. The Christian retort is exasperation. Rinse and repeat.

This is pretty bad. Apparently the Nicene Creed teaches modalism. Rather, orthodox Trinitarianism actually teaches the Father is NOT the Son is NOT the Holy Spirit, and so on. That is, the three Persons in the Trinity are ETERNALLY distinct. Yet those three Persons are one God. Modalism teaches the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three non-eternally distinct "modes" of one God. Therefore, a modalist could say that Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit because they are three different "modes" of one God.
Modalism, like Mormonism, is a heresy according to orthodox doctrine as found in the Nicene Creed.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

In this article here. John Hagee commits the error too. Indeed, it's evangelical megachurches and homeschoolers who are likeliest to fall into this trap. I'm going to skirt the issue of whether atheists can be good Americans (I think they can), and rather focus on the problems with Farah's thesis. As he argues:

America was founded on a creedal statement. It can be found in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Thus, America was founded on the principle that the Creator God endowed men with certain unalienable rights. This statement formed the basis of self-governance in a world ruled by kings and tyrants. It is the principle that set America apart from the rest of the world.

It’s important to note that the founders – and most of the 2 million people living in America at the time of the founding – were Christians who believed in the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They weren’t referring to any other god. They rejected Allah. They rejected paganism in all its forms. They rejected atheism.

America was thus founded as a Judeo-Christian nation, tolerant of other views, but with the understanding that only a moral people governing themselves to the best of their ability under God’s eternal laws were capable of maintaining the liberty established uniquely under this covenant.

The problems with Farah's argument are manifold. Let's dig in. Farah connects the DOI with his understanding of biblical Christianity which then slips into "Judeo-Christian." I'm not exactly sure what the modernish term "Judeo-Christian" means. As fundamentalists like Farah use it, apparently it means the orthodox Christian God where Jews get to tag along because of the special place they have as antecedents to Christians. Indeed, evangelicals like Farah, John Hagee, and Hal Lindsey who interpret biblical prophesy as demanding a pro-Israel stance (not all of them do) are, I observe, especially likely to parrot "Jews and Christians worship the same God, and Muslims (and apparently everyone else) do not."

Farah then quotes from Founders John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to support his case. The problem is these Founders were not "Christians" according to his understanding of the faith. They all rejected the Trinity. Farah didn't have to reference those Founders. But given they wrote the DOI it's understandable that he did.

It's simply not true that those Founders "rejected Allah." To the contrary, they rejected Joe Farah's exclusivist understanding of the faith. I have evidence from each of those three Founders AND from George Washington claiming that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. AND I have evidence from Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison claiming unconverted Great Spirit worshipping Indians worship the same God they did.

Moreover, Farah wrongly claims the Founders rejected "paganism in all its forms." They actually held the noble pagans of Ancient Greece and Rome (whose surnames they adopted) in very high regard.

Finally, the DOI is not a "biblical covenant." Rather it's a social contract that references a generic monotheistic God as the guarantor of unalienable natural rights.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

For a change, perhaps something good from WorldNetDaily. It's about Rev. James Caldwell. This was actually reprinted from Leben. I don't know enough about the history of Presbyterians and the American Revolution to comment. But I know friends, among others John Fea and Mark David Hall, are interested in this subject matter. Perhaps they can chime in on the accuracy of the article.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Mount Vernon, VA, June
4, 2012—One of the nation’s largest literary awards, the
annual George Washington Book Prize, has been awarded to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the
Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011). Jasanoff, a professor of
history at Harvard University, received the $50,000 prize on Monday evening,
June 4, at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate,
Museum & Gardens.

They find without fail that the claims fall into one of the following categories: 1) complete falsehoods (there are plenty of those); 2) misleading falsehoods (such as the story about wanting Christian imagery on the national seal—true, but on the other side of the seal, had Jefferson gotten his wish, would have been a pagan story); 3) true, but entirely irrelevant and ultimately misleading statements (such as signing documents with “the Year of our Lord,” which he did because pre-packaged treaty forms had that language, and had about as much meaning as signing “Dear” in our salutations in letters to complete strangers); 4) statements with a “kernel” of truth but blown so far out of proportion as to end up being false (such as Jefferson wanting federal funding for Indian missions, when in fact the titles of the bills simply took on the name of already existing religious societies; 5) baffling assertions that are so far out of the realm of reality as to be neither “true” nor “false,” but simply bizarre (such as Barton’s defense of Jefferson’s views on race, which were disturbingly ugly even by the standards of his era).

Today the planet Venus makes a rare transit across the face
of the sun. During the eighteenth
century, the astronomical alignment took place twice, in 1761 and 1769, drawing
observations from scientific teams all over the world, including North
America. Astronomers at that time were
able to produce the first truly accurate measurements of the distance between
the Earth and the sun, vastly expanding the known universe and kindling the
human imagination with an understanding of Deep Space.

The Declaration of Independence, a short time later, would
receive its first public reading from atop a tower constructed in Philadelphia
to view the transit. The American
Philosophical Society, the scientific body Benjamin Franklin founded, which
built the tower and organized the astronomical viewing under the leadership of
David Rittenhouse (who constructed the telescope, quadrant, pendulum clock and
other precision instruments necessary to do the siting) is located just next
door to Independence Hall. The new
cosmology went hand in hand with the new political paradigm, no longer based up
the heavenly mandate of a hereditary king, but upon the equal access of all to
the heavenly realms and their motions.

The Royal Astronomer of England, upon receiving a report of
the American measurements, wrote that “the first approximately accurate results
in the measurements of the spheres given to the world [was made] not by the
schooled and salaried astronomers who watched from the magnificent
observatories of Europe, but by unaided amateurs and devotees to science in the
youthful province of Pennsylvania.”

What else might come out of these colonies, where men by
their own wits and abilities could vie with the lords of the Old World? Today
you can watch the transit online or with protective filters—your last
opportunity to see what America’s Founders saw and wonder at an event that won’t
be repeated for 105 years.

"At root, Adams wanted to foster people’s devotion to virtue, to acting as they should, and to serving the public good. Only a virtuous people, he noted more than once, could be free." So writes Bruce Frohnen in this well-worth reading post over at the The University Bookman: On Statesmanship: The Case of John Adams. Frohnen does a very good job of explaining both the importance of Adams at the time of the Revolution and his monumental impact as a politician once the Constitution as ratified.I have long thought that Adams was seriously under-ranked as far as our presidents go -- and I've argued this point in several posts here at American Creation. Frohnen's post helps to solidify the case that Adams is a far more significant player in our national history than is usually acknowledged. Patriot, Federalist, conservative and traditionalist, Adams deserves a far closer look by those who would seek to maintain order and tradition without falling into the poisonous trap of ideology.

Monday, June 4, 2012

A lengthy essay on that topic by one of the master historians of the American founding may be found here: The Rhetoric of Alexander Hamilton. The author, Forest McDonald, does a very good job dispatching some of the gross distortions of Hamilton that have persisted since the radical Jeffersonians took it upon themselves to poison the record regarding this most uniquely American founding father. Far from seeking to create a centralized government based on greed and corruption, Hamilton sought to ensure that balanced government would be motivated by virtue, natural law and the principle of proper and precise debate over public policy issues.While the Jeffersonians were wallowing in the mud of crass politics, Hamilton sought to elevate discourse and speak clearly on the pressing issues of the day. As McDonald notes, Hamilton was unsure that the American experiment in constitutional government would succeed, but he was adamant in his commitment to fight for its viability in a world growing increasingly swamped by the fervor of ideology. And the key to viability was and is to shift the discussion from rights to duties, from benefits to obligations:

More than most of his countrymen, he doubted that the experiment could succeed; more than any of them, he was dedicated to making the effort. He perceived clearly that political rhetoric of the highest order was necessary to the attempt, for such is essential to statecraft in a republic. Now, we hear a great deal these days about the public’s “right to know.” That is a perversion of the truth, even as modern public relations, propaganda, and political blather are perversions of classical rhetoric. If the republic is to survive, the emphasis must be shifted from rights back to obligations. It is the obligation, not the right, of the citizen of a republic to be informed; it is the obligation of the public servant to inform him and simultaneously to raise his standards of judgment. In adapting his style to his audience, Hamilton was fulfilling his part of the obligation.

Ordered liberty was the goal of Hamilton's work. And ordered liberty requires not just a right ordering of the affairs of government, it requires a citizenry oriented to liberty and civic virtue. McDonald's essay does a fantastic job of showing Hamilton's commitment to defending ordered liberty against its enemies, using clear and energetic language grounded in the belief in morality, duty and prudential principle.

I had a great time at the Christians in Political Science Conference. My presentation went as well as I could have hoped for. More on that later. Further I was treated very graciously, as a guest (as opposed to a member).
I enjoyed meeting Gregg Frazer face to face for the first time and, as well, getting to know better, among others, Daniel Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Gary Scott Smith, all of whose work I enjoy and respect.
Finally, I'm glad I got to meet Anthony Gill who bought me a beer. He is an amazing public speaker and has some great ideas too.